100 Miles per Hour — HyperSpeed: Why I Can’t Lose: Volume VIII
Everything I do is at 100 miles per hour, full throttle. It’s no coincidence that my company is named HyperSpeed. While the name carries a triple entendre, as they say in rap, implying three different meanings under one term, HyperSpeed primarily signifies moving very fast, simplifying, and enhancing. In my organization’s case, it boosts health, athletic ability, and overall performance — not just in sports but in every aspect of life. While sport is our domain, our performance rating considers components such as body composition and grade point average, along with functional movement skills and athletic ability, holistically evaluating an amateur athlete’s overall ability.
The second meaning is a play on the word hypertrophy, which refers to the enlargement of cells that leads to an increase in the size of an organ or tissue. In the context of exercise, hypertrophy is the growth of muscle cells or an increase in muscle size. Hypertrophy training focuses on developing muscles by increasing the size of muscle fibers, coupling this with speed. Here, we focus not just on increasing muscle size through strength training but also on training at high speeds to enhance our body’s ability to recruit more muscle fibers and optimize our ability to generate force, increasing both strength and speed, making our training focused on functional movements at rapid speeds. The origin of the company was private skills training and sports performance, which corresponded with a training philosophy I had centered around unique bodyweight training, lightweight training, fast-twitch movements, often barefoot, putting athletes under unique sets of circumstances, forcing them into a fight-or-flight state, fostering rapid adaptation, and often working until failure.
The last part of the name stems from technological advancements in sports performance, the intersection of performance and technology that amplifies the capabilities of humans through utilizing data and technology to enhance our overall functioning and capacity for productivity. This approach views a human as a machine, enhancing its overall operating capacity. Our logo, the S curve, is quite comparable to the S curve of the spinal column, composed of 33 vertebrae.
The legal name of HyperSpeed Performance Technologies is HyperSp33d. The 33 is expressed in the logo as the data points on the opposing side of the curve create a structure similar to the infinity symbol between the spinal column, symbolizing humans, and the data depicting how we use data to optimize our ability, which perfectly encapsulates who we are at the core. The fact that it creates an infinity symbol is also emblematic of the balance between the physical and digital worlds.
However, as the founder, I must state that although technology and data are remarkable and revolutionary in the phase of industrial innovation, they are only as good as our ability to utilize them. The most important aspect is people, how we treat one another, work together in groups to create civilizations, ultimately society, and then communities, finding harmony and ultimately reaching a point where all humans can prosper. To grow and understand this is by and large an ongoing pursuit of what it means to be human and understanding the power of love and community. These concepts are dear to my heart. Sports is one domain that teaches these exact lessons, and in early adolescence, we get our first exposure. If not a sport, at least an art form, an instrument, a trade, a hobby, an individual must do something. Well, sport is the domain, drawing parallels from the sports world to the business world was something I spent the inception of this company on trying to bring the system into the corporate world, enhancing employee wellbeing for more productive and healthier companies.
While I believe healthier employees would impact the bottom line, it doesn’t save them money or make them more money now. It’s a nice-to-have but not a necessity. I still disagree but in American enterprise, trying to launch a company off the ground, you can’t shift the entire market’s perception and that’s fine. I have learned how to count my losses. From the cool esoteric/exoteric meaning of my company, from a training company to employee health, to landing in sports. I find myself in a blue ocean. I see Hudl, the company that made watching film widely accessible in the early 2010s first throughout America and now globally. They gather statistics, share film files, create highlight tapes, and offer many more features but that’s what they do at the core, and now they have branched off into selling cameras and I am sure they have a drone coming if they don’t have one already. Then there’s Catapult Sports, starting with GPS hardware in a compression shirt, to now breaking down film and competing directly with Hudl. These are the two leaders in the clubhouse in the sports tech space, and well, infinite other wearable devices, and coaches’ software that use buzzwords like AI, and make all these claims about solving problems but are either too complex, not affordable, don’t really solve a problem, or don’t have an audience that needs what they have to offer. I sound kind of harsh, but as a founder who’s keen on watching trends and the evolution of not just sport but industry, you grow fatigued by just seeing all these bullshit companies where I cannot quite wrap my head around why they even exist.
From working for a fitness software company, to then conducting research with wearables, to running public health events, to implementing my first prototypes in gyms, I have seen this industry from all angles, and I found myself getting outside of myself thinking I have become some tech expert in order to penetrate the market. However, through about a 4-year journey, since I left the 9–5 world, it wasn’t until I somewhat put aspirations of building a company to the side, taught PE at the grade school level, then at university, got back into personal training and group fitness classes, and sports coaching upon developing my prototype in which I was able to come back to center, in understanding, how the consumer values data, how data could make me a better teacher or instructor, and how I can leverage information to make my life easier. While I can gather a great deal of information on someone and generate reports, on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, I learned how people often train to simply lose weight or build muscle, even just to stay healthy. They would like to know what they need to do or how they will get there but that’s why they pay you, so the tools I use are for me, and not to share everything with them.
This breakthrough put into perspective that coaching is a human service so digitizing it is bullshit, but I know that in sports they use analytics. I also know through experience, and conversations with many coaches, and former athletes, that while analytics have their place, only a select few organizations in just pro sports alone live and die by analytics, this is a brand-new concept, but what about measuring injury, player workload, or helping an athlete understand themselves, and this is where I found a market. Having already done 5 athletic programs, the feedback has been transformative, and coaches love the information I gather. From body composition data to functional movement analysis to athletic-based testing. I am gathering essential information and using it to gather insights and provide reports per athlete, but aggregate the data and help a coach understand their team. Is a kid a college prospect, if so what school is a fit for them? Have they been hurt before, and now their squat is jacked up, this is what they are at risk for, do they want to play pro football, well dad played college baseball and mom is 5’11 while this 15-year-old is only 5’9 he has the pedigree and is still growing. And the more insights we gather, as we go to schools offering our service, we train our data sets. A service company right now, but it won’t be long until our services transform, and we are a data company.
My company while we have advisors, is currently a one-person entity implying I do the sales, I go provide the service, and I fulfill. Our service is rather affordable, and we have quite high margins, while I may overwork myself quickly there’s a framework in place to keep growing, and this leads me to my conclusion.
33 is a master number, my favorite number, it’s in the name and it deeply resonates, it was Kobe Bryant’s high school number, well take our logo and it makes the infinity symbol or the number 8 when flipped up, Kobe Bryant’s first NBA number, I recently wrote in my last installment “No Plan B,” referencing Kobe’s desire to make it to the NBA as a kid in Italy by any means necessary. Well, this state of urgency, and innate drive is how I operated as an athlete, which was very much a failed career, due to my inability to stay healthy. What if I had the information I am providing, well that makes me think, that this system sure would have helped me. I have cleared out my savings once before in building this company, only to recognize I have nothing, and I need to take a step back. Well, I have saved up a lot of money yet again, and I have various streams of income doing quite well, but I cannot make the leap unless I do this full-time and fortunately enough, I have been here before. I also have been in a ton of debt, I got myself out of it, so now if I have to do it again, that is not a problem.
For a while, I was reluctant to ask anyone for money, but now I know I need help because this idea is real. I want former and existing pro athletes as my early investors, and college athlete influencers marketing the product, along with sports executives on my team, and I am ready to go. I will give up portions of my company, I DON’T CARE! I believe providing athletes with resources to stay healthy and know the right fit as far as college and providing direction for their athletic journey is a problem that needs to be solved more so than the demand to take the credit. I have spoken in front of large groups and knocked on doors doing political work all over this country. You can throw me anywhere, I WILL FIND A WAY. I have no fear of failure, and now I know I have something that fundamentally exists and is not just an idea. Check out our website for yourself www.hyperspeed-usa.com I spoke about Kobe Bryant’s will to win and the fire inside of me about how I do things 100 miles per hour, well I write this having been up since 3 am, having run my second sub 6:30 mile of the day countless jump shooting, push-ups, and sit-ups. The mamba mentality is deeply embedded in HyperSpeed, as I live life like an active pro athlete. This is what fuels me. One would say I am a maniac. Perhaps Like a snake shedding its skin, removing all things that no longer serve me. I am in a different mental place right now and while I cannot tell you what’s going to happen, I KNOW that I will NOT STOP.
The HyperSpeed system has its place in sports, and if I am not the one to carry it someone else will but it will leave a mark. My relentless pursuit of attacking life is the spirit of the company as most founders look to embody this exact thing, I feel it, it’s one with me. As I evolve as a human being, putting HyperSpeed out there, it may go through hurdles, but it will not fail because I know I will not fail. It’s the refuse-to-be-denied mindset and desire to find an edge by any means necessary that equips me to find a way to win. This is the exact approach I want every coach and athlete alike to embody when they use our services and it’s that outcome alone that makes every day worth fighting for, as I step outside of being a sports coach, fitness instructor, and teacher, and Coach Wilson the Founder & President of HyperSpeed.
